Thirty-four years ago, this day – Election Day eve, for those of you reading on Monday – seemed like it would never come. The right to vote had recently been granted to 18-year-olds and, being a female and ineligible for the draft, it was the most adult thing I’d ever contemplated. I looked forward to casting my first vote more than I had to getting my driver’s license, going to my high school prom, graduating from high school or any other important milestone. There was a sense of victory over “the establishment” in this act, and my generation was empowered.

Of course, voting in a presidential election seemed almost child’s play compared to the adult world my older brother had been dropped into without his consent. He had been drafted and sent to Vietnam, where he served with the 101st Airborne Division and, mercifully, picked up some shrapnel in his arm and returned home before he had reached legal voting age. Another brother had been to Germany and back and still was too young to vote.

The hypocrisy was overwhelming and it fueled a revolution. People younger than 21 could be drafted and quite possibly lose their lives in a war in which they had no political power to support or prevent. In 1971, the 26th Amendment was ratified in a record four months and citizens 18 and older were given the right to vote.

In retrospect, we might have reversed the argument and held firm to the position that an 18-year-old who is considered too young to vote also should also be viewed as too young to go to war. It was a missed opportunity to get those M-16s out of the hands of babies. Eighteen seemed then and seems especially so now too young to be in life-or-death situations brought about by flawed policy decisions by their parents and grandparents.

But we got the right to vote, and I looked forward to my 18th birthday more than my 21st, the legal drinking age in Missouri at a time when most the surrounding states allowed people old enough to fight in Vietnam to also have an adult beverage. We’re a little regressive in that respect. How many soldiers serving in Iraq are under the legal drinking age? Does it make any sense that if a person isn’t old enough to drink, that person also is not old enough to decide if a political action is worth dying for?

They can vote, though, and that’s something.

I like to think my first presidential vote in November 1972 for George McGovern was an “informed” vote. Because of his anti-war and amnesty stance, I was already firmly in McGovern’s camp, despite his dumping of Missouri favorite son Tom Eagleton as his running mate, so the break-in and bugging of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Office Building the previous June didn’t hold much sway with me – or with most voters. Polls at the time showed most Americans were either unaware of the break-in or, if they did know about it, were unconcerned about the implications. Certainly, only a clairvoyant could have predicted that Richard Nixon would resign in disgrace less than two years after he was re-elected in a landslide.

Today, Nixon’s foibles seem not so fatal and history remembers him as not so horrible. But that’s another story, for another day.

There is a point to this trip down memory lane. Make sure your vote Tuesday, whether for the Republicans or the Democrats or the growing list of independent candidates in scandal-ridden Central Iowa, is informed. At the risk of sounding like right-wing radio blowhard Sean Hannity, if you’re basing your decision on whom to vote for on those nasty, distorted television ads, do us all a favor and stay home.

Beth Dalbey can be reached by e-mail at bethdalbey@bpcdm.com.